Detecting and predicting lightning just got a lot easier. The first images from a new instrument onboard NOAA's GOES-16 satellite are giving NOAA National Weather Service forecasters richer information about lightning that ...

Here's a secret for you: At NOAA's National Weather Service, we're like kids when it comes to snow. We love it! If you love snow like we do, become a "snow-it-all" in time for the start of the winter solstice, which starts ...

On Sept. 21, 2014, NASA scientists and engineers launched RapidScat toward the orbiting International Space Station, 250 miles above the Earth's surface, with a few objectives in mind: improve weather forecasting on Earth, ...

Scheduled for launch from Cape Canaveral Nov. 19, the nation's newest weather satellite, GOES-R, promises to revolutionize how researchers and forecasters see the Earth from space. Scientists at Colorado State University ...

A UTA civil engineering professor and hydrologic researcher expects to improve the accuracy of rainfall maps produced by the National Weather Service by 10 to 20 percent for heavy-to-extreme rainfall events through a National ...

Weather forecasting

Weather forecasting is the application of science and technology to predict the state of the atmosphere for a future time and a given location. Human beings have attempted to predict the weather informally for millennia, and formally since at least the nineteenth century. Weather forecasts are made by collecting quantitative data about the current state of the atmosphere and using scientific understanding of atmospheric processes to project how the atmosphere will evolve.

Once an all human endeavor based mainly upon changes in barometric pressure, current weather conditions, and sky condition, forecast models are now used to determine future conditions. Human input is still required to pick the best possible forecast model to base the forecast upon, which involves pattern recognition skills, teleconnections, knowledge of model performance, and knowledge of model biases. The chaotic nature of the atmosphere, the massive computational power required to solve the equations that describe the atmosphere, error involved in measuring the initial conditions, and an incomplete understanding of atmospheric processes mean that forecasts become less accurate as the difference in current time and the time for which the forecast is being made (the range of the forecast) increases. The use of ensembles and model consensus help narrow the error and pick the most likely outcome.

There are a variety of end uses to weather forecasts. Weather warnings are important forecasts because they are used to protect life and property. Forecasts based on temperature and precipitation are important to agriculture, and therefore to traders within commodity markets. Temperature forecasts are used by utility companies to estimate demand over coming days. On an everyday basis, people use weather forecasts to determine what to wear on a given day. Since outdoor activities are severely curtailed by heavy rain, snow and the wind chill, forecasts can be used to plan activities around these events, and to plan ahead and survive them.